Sometimes, you just need to rethink how things work. That happened to us yesterday. In the rethinking process, we decided it was time for a change. Rest assured - this change does not break anything and there is nothing you need to do for everything to continue to work in BVCMS.

Do I have your attention? Want to know what it was that we changed? Keep reading.

Almost since the inception of BVCMS, we have had the concept of Rollsheet Visitor Weeks which determines how many weeks after a person's last visit to a class that their name stays on the roll sheet.

We have also had the concept of Attend Types , which assigns a designation (a type of attendance) to everyone who attends a meeting. The first time someone attends a class, they are assigned an Attend Type of New Visitor . After that, the Attend Type is Recent Visitor - at least, until they actually become a Member of the class.

It's where these two concepts meet that we had our epiphany yesterday.

Previously, we let the Rollsheet Visitor Weeks determine when a person would have an Attend Type of New Visitor again in the same class . In other words, if a person did not visit for several weeks (initially, this was set at 4 weeks), we wanted to treat them as a First Time Visitor. The rationale is this: if a person goes very long between visits, we should probably employ the same strategy as we would for a First Time Visitor.

That has worked just fine for us here at Bellevue. However, because the setting is not hard-wired anymore and can be set to as many weeks as you want for each class (and some set this as low as one week), we realized that we should use something else to determine when a person reverted to a New Visitor again.

Here's how we decided to handle this. There is now a setting in the database for ResetNewVisitorDays . The default is 180 days . If your church wants to change this (make it higher or lower), the Admin can add this to your church's settings and enter the number of days you decide is appropriate for your church.

I'm sure you will agree that this is much better solution.

Click HERE to read more.

Thank you, Sandy, for asking the question that spurred our thought processes!